At this point things are looking to be in good shape, I’m calling this a BETA because I’m very conservative, and because encryption can go wrong in such grand fashion. I’d rather this image wasn’t used for critical or production use. Make sure to have backups!

Happy 2013 to all regular readers and the occasional visitor. It’s been a while since this site was updated, but this was due to work and holidays.

Hopefully we’ll see FreeBSD 10 released this year and the use of FreeBSD increased.

Followers of the FreeBSD Central Google+ page will have had regular updates over the last few weeks. Please subscribe to that page and stay even more up-to-date with all that’s happening the FreeBSD Community.

In case you missed it, there have been some releases and the FreeBSD Foundation successfully completed its fund raising drive.

We have a quick FreeBSD related events update: one that’s upcoming(MeetBSD) and one that has taken place already (KyivBSD).

MeetBSD California 2012

MeetBSD California will be held this upcoming weekend, November 3-4 at Yahoo! in Santa Clara, CA.

Josh Paetzel will be presenting “FreeNAS: Storage for Open Source” and Kris Moore will be presenting “The Warden – FreeBSD and Linux Jail Management”

KyivBSD 2012

KyivBSD 2012 took place in September. Andrei has written up a summary (EN – Google Translate) of the day. Another conference took place that same weekend which had an effect on the number of visitors. The page contains links to the videos and presentation summaries.

Josh Paetzel from iXsystems has announced the release of FreeNAS 8.3.0:

“The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.3.0-RELEASE. FreeNAS 8.3.0 is based on FreeBSD 8.3 with version 28 of the ZFS file system. This is a major milestone in FreeNAS development, bringing in the plugin system with ZFS version 28. Development of the FreeNAS 8.2 branch has come to a halt, as both ZFS version 15 as well as FreeBSD 8.2 are no longer supported. There have been no major changes between 8.3.0-RC1 and RELEASE, mostly bug fixes and minor usability improvements to the GUI.”

There’s some good plugin documentation available on the FreeNAS website explaining how to use the plugins, how to install the plugins jail, how to create, find, install, and configure PBIs, such as Firefly, miniDLNA and Transmission. If there’s no PBI available (yet), the page shows how you can create your own PBIs, and how to install non-PBI software using the FreeBSD ports and packages collections.

Plugin support is still a bit crude in FreeNAS 8.2, but it is looking a lot more polished in the upcoming FreeNAS 8.3.

The FreeNAS team has announced the availability of FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA3. This is the last planned public beta of 8.3.0 as it moves towards the final.

“This BETA includes a refactoring of the Active Directory and LDAP integration. It has a rework of serial port support, adding the ability to set the serial port speed. The NFS sharing was refactored in BETA2 with an eye towards maintaining compatability with sharing schemes set up in previous FreeNAS releases. The refactored sharing is more powerful and flexible than previous releases, while enforcing the OS based rules. Support for the LSI “skinny” RAID conrollers was added.”